Webinar Announcement: The Hidden Business Value of Gamification

As Esteban Kolsky announced in his latest blog post, he will be working on a series of posts and webinars throughout the year of 2012, using the series to "introduce ideas, research, and what you need to know to leverage Gamification in business."

Ever since organizations began to use gamification principles in business situations they've sought "engagement" as the action and metric that proves it works. As the theory goes, we can leverage gaming mechanics to improve how we engage with customers and prospects and higher levels of engagement leads to more satisfied customers and users, in turn creating loyal advocates, fans, and supporters. Problem is, no one can define engagement appropriately – less along measure or use it correctly.

Engagement is not what drives this conversion. The excessive focus on gaming mechanics and how to bring more people to web sites more often clouds the real reason behind using gamification in business: behavioral economics (the other half of gamification). Contrary to popular belief, businesses should not use gamification to increase engagement or to entertain their customers and prospects; gamification is mostly about changing behaviors by using gaming techniques – and this is where there has been little attention.

In this webinar we will focus on the backside of gamification: what happens after the entertainment and the engagement and what business value should organizations derive from adopting gamification engines in their organizations.

We will explore at a high level what business should do, what solutions they want to embrace, and what value and metrics to use to make sure they are getting what they need from gamification. As the first in a series of four webinars, we will cover the big picture and we will explore in the next three the core components of making behavioral changes the goal of gamification: purpose, infrastructure, and metrics and success factors.